ECAS 2013

Police forces are an arm of the state dedicated to regulating social behaviour and preventing actions deemed incompatible with the common good. Yet, and especially in plural postcolonial societies such as Nigeria, they must do this with reference to multiple definitions of the common good. The state's definition, embedded in the corpus of formal laws, has a powerful normative hold even while publics recognise that governments and constituted authorities themselves are often built on foundations of problematic legitimacy. Alongside the law, communities maintain longstanding self-defined principles of what is legitimate and illegitimate. And the police themselves are not a 'neutral' category, having not only their own professional sense of morality and legitimacy, but also powerful institutional and personal reasons to promote certain outcomes and avoid others. Meanwhile, other agents, both state and non-state, offer alternative avenues for resolution and redress of which police forces must be cognisant. This paper aims to trace the contours and distribution of police power in Nigeria, by looking at both historical and contemporary examples where the Nigeria Police Force can be seen to creatively work with these pluralities, outside the formal procedures of the criminal justice system, to preserve an overall goal of maintaining or restoring social peace. The system as a whole produces a paradoxical result - a perennially dynamic and fluid system of policing as social action and mixed jurisdiction, which is however itself comparatively stable.

When Ghanaian police officers patrol the streets at night, the radio is mostly silent. The patrol team has to find police work proactively, in contrast to criminal investigations. However, even the seemingly straight-forward activities of the patrol team involve multiple forms of policing. The act of patrolling has a symbolic dimension, demarcating the spaces they attempt to control. Police officers also decide in which situations on the street they intervene, thereby categorizing some incidents as police matters. Other incidents are ignored and competing policing actors can appropriate them. Lastly, the various manners in which they approach and resolve the incidents determine what specific social order they produce.

Many encounters of the patrol team lead to some kind of informal arrangement, in which money is handed over to them. This is why, depending on the area they patrol, police officers tend to target these illegal activities that promise the highest revenue: traffic offences, illegal woodcutting, sale of narcotics, etc. Yet despite their blatant monetary interests, most police officers carefully use their discretion to frame their interactions in terms of impartial law enforcement, serving the common good. The possible use of law as punishment guides all their practices. However, because of political pressure and the considerable influence of their civilian counterparts, they also align their practices to other moral orders. The social order they enforce ultimately emerges out of this constant tension between market logic, communal solidarity, and the law.

The main focus of this paper is analysing the role of community vigilante groups in meeting policing needs in semi urban/rural Plateau state, Nigeria. Who are the vigilante groups? What do they do? How are they organised and structured? Where do they get legitimacy? What role have historical precedents played in current practices?

Secondly, recognising the fact that vigilante groups operate in different space scenarios i.e.; in areas where state policing is visible and dominant, visible but weak and areas where it is non-existent -the paper is interested in examining the dynamics that characterize relationships within a space of plurality. The paper considers the dynamics that characterize the relationship between the police, the local community and vigilante groups. However, in our case plurality is not strictly defined as state vs. non-state - there is a case for not just a plurality of actors but also recognising different practices and what they create.

Theoretical underpinnings of this research are derived from existing literature on the post-colonial African state; the legacies of its colonial past and the contradictions of its post-colonial history, particularly as it relates to the provision of security.

The paper relies on a multi-disciplinary research approach that is largely historical, but also ethnographic. I have relied on research interviews, archival materials and field observation.

This paper focuses on the everyday policing practices of armed response officers, a specific group of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa and is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork. Founded on the concept of twilight institutions (Lund 2006), this paper argues that armed response officers are engaged in twilight policing, a policing style that is performative, punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary and operates in a twilight zone between state and non-state. Twilight policing is analyzed as the performance of sovereign power that is the result of the imbrication of public and private sovereign bodies. Although operating as private actors steered by market forces, armed response officers are increasingly operating in public spaces and incorporating particular "languages of stateness" (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). In doing so, they are challenging the state police through a competition over authority and legitimacy, yet they are simultaneously strengthening understandings of the state by mimicking the state and supplementing them through informal and formal partnerships. This multifaceted relationship with the state points towards a set of practices and processes that continuously cut across the intersections of state-non-state, legal-illegal, and formal-informal. Through focusing on a particular case study, this paper argues that policing in South Africa at large should be analyzed as an entanglement of public and private policing practices. Furthermore, focus should be placed on understanding and dissecting when, where, and how these entanglements occur and how they produce multistranded sovereign practices.

This paper explores the shifting relationship between local policing and party politics in urban Tanzania. Contemporary 'community policing' initiatives form part of a long history of government, or ruling party, attempts to promote citizen responsibility for local security, notably through the co-optation of sungusungu vigilante organisations in the 1980s and early 1990s. Popular participation in sungusungu in urban areas was largely predicated upon the capacity of the ruling party to enforce compliance and its tolerance of the violent methods employed by sungusungu. Contemporary local government institutions retain some capacity to oblige residents to contribute labour or material resources to local policing activities and are largely able to determine the objectives of community policing, often at the expense of 'idle' youth who are deemed a threat to public order. However, in today's multiparty context local leaders face considerable difficulties in sustaining participation, partly due to the extent to which community policing, like other local development projects, is highly politicised. Attempts to introduce community policing and improve neighbourhood safety are often perceived as a strategy to increase the popularity of the ruling party and thus obstructed by supporters of opposition parties who argue that the state should be responsible for providing security. Localised conflicts over community policing also have a generational character, as young people, who are more likely to support opposition parties, also challenge their historical obligation to contribute to local development and resent the increased powers assumed by local leaders through community policing.

Policing in South Africa is not, nor has it ever been, the sole remit of the state. An expanding literature on the country explores how crime is defined and policed by those who are positioned inside, outside and in the contested zone between state and society.

Currently, however, there is little work on approaches to crime within Indian townships, and barely any work that comparatively analyses approaches in Indian townships with approaches to crime elsewhere.

In this paper, I explore how residents in an Indian township and in a black township tackle theft and robbery. My paper draws on 80 qualitative, in-depth interviews, media analysis and participant observation conducted over the course of seven months of fieldwork.

Implicitly and explicitly, residents in the Indian township framed their approach to crime as being clearly distinct from that of the nearby black township. And, indeed, these two townships have divergent socio-political histories that reflect their place within the racialized political order of apartheid. Consequently, everyday policing in both areas draws on different historical 'repertoires' or 'templates'. Whilst recognising these differences, I also explore the similarities in approaches between the two townships, and the divergence of approaches that exist within them. These two case studies confirm that'multiply positioned citizens' (Gupta and Sharma 2002) in South Africa variably use, transfigure and reject the language, resources and authority of the state (see Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Crucially, though, I argue that a comparative lens can strengthen our appreciation of how, when and why these strategies are used, and with what consequences.

The capacity of the Royal Swaziland Police to handled crimes is challenged by alternative forms of policing and by rival political constellations. Policing and politics often merge, as police officers, community police, traditional leaders, the king's councillors and elected politicians draw on and dispute each other to consolidate their power within local constituencies. Who resolves family disputes, crimes and land quarrels is a political matter, although not always explicitly termed political. This paper looks at the linkages between policing and politics in an urban constituency, situated in the largest industrial area of the small Kingdom. It is a high density area, mainly inhabited by newcomers from around the country. While providing a space of hope for a better life, the area is known for its high levels of crime, youth unemployment and moral decay. It is also notorious for its strong community policing group, said to have drastically reduced crime, yet which has also made its way into the courts and the news headlines due to its violent methods. The community police have also turned into a site for political contestations and opportunities in the midst of a longstanding traditional leadership dispute over the governance of the area. Community policing members are drawn into rival political battles, and some also aspire to become politicians and local leaders themselves.

At the heart of international support to building legitimacy of the Sierra Leone state in the late 1990s was the intention 'for the police to resume primacy in maintaining law and order'. Sierra Leone was emerging from war and in the minds of international supporters of state-building this meant building police stations, writing codes of conduct and training police officers. However, while police reform was cast in technical terms, it was a fundamentally political project that entailed re-composing the justice and security field and the distribution of authority within it. Because this political dimension was misrecognized, police reform reproduced rather than over-turned the powers of traditional leaders in rural Sierra Leone that are drawn from their autochthon status and secret society membership as well as legal status in the country's constitution. It was in this capacity that they came to play a key role in appropriating and at times rejecting police reform components, thereby stifling the state-building effort. The political powers of traditional leaders were not fully recognized to be important factors in reform efforts, and therefore the hybrid order that they embody was reproduced. This argument is explored by comparing how police reform is constituted to how order is conceptualized and enforced in Motema Division of Eastern Kono, Sierra Leone. The paper explores the key community policing institution of the reform effort, namely Local Policing Partnership Boards. It shows how the introduction of Partnership Boards consolidated the position of chiefs who became the main interlocutors in their establishment.

The customary law systems which have been recognised as integral to the legal and judicial structures of the new state of South Sudan are often associated with restorative justice mechanisms and assumed to be less adversarial or punitive than state justice. Yet the chiefs' courts which are assumed to apply such customary law in reality impose punitive fines, imprisonment or flogging, alongside restorative compensation awards. Since the first chiefs' courts were established in the colonial period, they were backed up - or claimed to be backed up - by the force of state policing and punishment. This paper will explore how and why people have sought to access as well as to avoid the punitive force of the state, and how ideas of policing and judicial sanction have interacted with indigenous judicial cultures and practices. It draws on extensive archival and oral research on the history of local government and justice in South Sudan. It argues that we need to move beyond the often romantic depictions of restorative and consensual community justice, to understand its politics and violence, and its place in state formation.

Zimbabwe's transition to majority rule was marked by violent political repression that only came to an end with the Unity Accord of 1987, under which the ruling ZANU(PF) absorbed its rival nationalist party, ZAPU. This period was in part characterised by an extremely uneven military conflict in which civilians loyal to ZAPU bore the brunt of state violence, but it was also a period of political transition in which the role and rule of law featured centrally. The paper explores the ways in which the legal and repressive legacies of the Rhodesian state and the notions of order and authority held by the nationalist parties and armies were invoked and contested through practices of political detention and imprisonment. These practices required both appealing to and subverting the law by moving policing and punishment between legal and extra-legal institutions and places. Contestation over these processes and practices powerfully shaped the making of the new political order and state.

Policing around business spaces provides emblematic empirical illustrations of plural and competing policing in Africa. It also shows that plurality should not be limited to policing actors. This paper therefore looks at different forms and practices of policing. It examines policing practices around the sites of multinational mining companies in South Africa. Focusing on company practices it looks at the different discourses and social fields that shape their different practices of policing a well as the politics of engaging in but also outsourcing policing to other actors. The paper shows that mining companies have shaped policing in business spaces by shaping relevant national policies. They have also fostered the commercialisation of policing and application of surveillance and risk-management practices, building islands of private policing in some areas. However, companies have also engaged in selectively building the state's reactive, coercive capacities and engage with local communities and local government in order to police mining areas. This is hence not about a pluralisation of actors of policing. Rather, there is a growing 'enmeshment' of state and commercial policing practices and competition between different practices across public-private boundaries. Informed by different discourses and historical social practice, legal and illegal forms of reactive coercion and indirect rule, and prevention and participatory community policing co-exist and compete in the policing of business spaces.